Tag: Accurate Temperatures

This is my first try with cooking shellfish sous vide : a lobster tail.

I looked at Thomas Keller’s time and temperature table which mentioned a cooking temperature at 60°C during 15 minutes for a lobster tail. I am realizing more and more that Baldwin’s Sous Vide Guide is very practical. The information about the thickness is key. Douglas Baldwin indicates a 20 mm shellfish is pasteurized at 60.5°C at the condition being cooked during 41 minutes. I have decided to follow Douglas’ recommendations.

I took off the shell and seasoned the lobster tail with salt, pepper and a frozen teaspoon of “extra vierge” olive oil. After cooking I seared the lobster tail some seconds in a skillet with some olive oil.

The result was very good. The flesh of the lobster was moist and had a very pleasant flavour of olive oil.

Here are some of Thomas Keller information about cooking times and temperature.

Contrary to Viktor Stampfer’s book that indicates a temperature of the waterbath slightly higher to the core temperature of the ingredient contained in the pouch, Thomas Keller indicates the starting temperature (3.3°C) of the food, the time and the temperature of the bath only. This is definitely less confusing.

I saw so many posts on the net speaking highly about the precise temperature and time to cook a “perfect” soft boiled egg. The range of temperature for a soft egg varies from 57°C (basically raw) to 70°C (hard-boiled, right before it gets that green ring around the yolk).

After reading the Cookingissues article about soft eggs I decided to try the 63°C soft boiled egg cooked for 1 hours with my Julabo immersion circulator. In this article they say my “ favorite 63°C “custard egg”—so named because of the creamy consistency of the yolk, which cannot be achieved with conventional cooking”.

My 63°C soft boiled egg has not reached my expectations. The yolk was not as creamy as mentioned in the Cookingissues article. The egg was good but nothing special in my opinion. Next time I’ll raise the temperature of 1°C (64°C) and see what happens.